Epilogue — Movement III: A Life Reconsidered
The work started to feel like something I was being led to follow. This chapter traces the moments, people, and patterns that forced me to reconsider whether my life had been guided all along.
By that point, I had come to believe that this book was coming through me more than from me.
I do not say that lightly, and I do not say it comfortably. In fact, I resisted saying it for a long time. But the deeper I got into the work, the harder it became to describe it any other way. It was not unfolding according to any pattern I recognized in myself. It was not the usual process of becoming interested in a medicine, reading deeply, and then slowly putting forth a coherent argument for its efficacy. This was different. Thoughts, realizations, and connections were arriving from different directions, through different people, at times that often felt difficult to explain.
I had seen quotes from artists and writers saying that the work came through them, not from them, and I always thought that sounded a little mystical, maybe even self-important. During this book, it stopped sounding that way.
That did not make me feel important. If anything, it made me uneasy. Because the question I kept returning to, over and over again, was simple:
Why me?
Not in a grand or self-exalting way. Almost the opposite. If there is one thing I know about myself, it is that I am not inclined to assign myself more importance than I deserve. I have never had any interest in thinking of myself as special in that way. In fact, I am deeply uncomfortable with anything that feels like idolatry. Once I became a public figure in my own small corner of the world, I learned quickly that admiration does not energize me; it drains me. People would thank me, tell me I was their favorite doctor or their hero, or say that something I taught had helped save a parent or grandparent during Covid. Those moments were often moving, but they were also too much. Before long, at conferences, I was retreating to my hotel room and coming out only to speak or attend a dinner because I could feel how depleted I became. So if anyone imagines that I seek fame, celebrity, or praise, the truth is much closer to the opposite. I just do what I do. I work. I read. I obsess. I try to understand. I try to help.
And yet the deeper I got into this work, the less it felt like something I was generating out of my own interests and abilities. What was coming through had a power, immensity, and gravity that I had not previously been capable of. I came up with alternative explanations for that feeling, arguing to myself that it was simply some improbable confluence of timing, curiosity, accumulated knowledge, new tools, and the strange collisions of people and ideas that life sometimes produces. I was fully capable of making those arguments. But none of them fully explained the pattern.
I felt like I was being pulled into something bigger than myself. What I could not understand was why I, of all people, would have been brought into it.
